Despite the progress made in achieving equality in the workplace, discrimination is still far more evident than we would like.  Our perceptions of something like racism are far from uniform, however, as new research from Washington University in St. Louis highlights.

It suggests that the impression of workplace racism among black workers is highly influenced by their own position in the organizational hierarchy.

“Research shows that black individuals encounter an enormous amount of racial discrimination in the workplace, including exclusion from critical social networks, wage disparities, and hiring disadvantages,” the researchers say. “But we don’t know how to explain what kinds of discrimination seem most salient to black workers themselves, or why perceptions of discrimination vary within this racial group.”

Vantage point

One might instinctively believe that the higher one gets in the organization, the less discrimination one is exposed to, but the research in fact shows the opposite.  The higher up a black worker was in the organizational hierarchy, the more aware they were of discrimination throughout the business.

The researchers believe this is primarily because the different organizational processes hugely inform how, and where, black employees see racial discrimination in action.  Their findings emerged from interviews with numerous black doctors, nurses and technicians from the healthcare industry.

“Black doctors, who are highly placed in the hierarchy of health care facilities, focus much more on structural and organizational discrimination—educational disparities, biases in hiring policies,” they explain.  “In contrast, black nurses, who occupy a lower place in the hierarchy, observe both organizational and individual racial discrimination. They, too, focus on biases in hiring, but are also attuned to personal discrimination from supervisors. Black technicians, who are still lower in the organizational hierarchy, mostly describe individual discrimination. They see how supervisors discriminate against black technicians, but are not privy to how organizational rules create widespread differences for black workers.”

These differences in perception are clearly linked to one’s position in the hierarchy of the organization, and so those higher up are able to see a much broader, and more complete, range of discrimination than those lower down.

The research has established how mechanisms such as promotions, hiring and status are all crucial to our understanding of the role status and hierarchy plays in our connection with perceptions of racial discrimination.  While it was a relatively small study, it therefore provides some interesting direction for further analysis in different organizations, with perhaps a larger sample.